: (en) Media, Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria? by David Graeber

Amid the Syrian warzone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the ground by Isis. 
That the wider world is unaware is a scandal. ---- In 1937, my father volunteered to fight 
in the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic. A would-be fascist coup 
had been temporarily halted by a worker?s uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and 
socialists, and in much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued, leading to whole 
cities under directly democratic management, industries under worker control, and the 
radical empowerment of women. ---- Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a 
free society that the entire world might follow. Instead, world powers declared a policy 
of ?non-intervention? and maintained a rigorous blockade on the republic, even after 
Hitler and Mussolini, ostensible signatories, began pouring in troops and weapons to 
reinforce the fascist side. The result was years of civil war that ended with the 
suppression of the revolution and some of a bloody century?s bloodiest massacres.

I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same thing happen again. Obviously, 
no historical event ever really happens twice. There are a thousand differences between 
what happened in Spain in 1936 and what is happening in Rojava, the three largely Kurdish 
provinces of northern Syria, today. But some of the similarities are so striking, and so 
distressing, that I feel it?s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose 
politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we cannot let it end 
the same way again.

The autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots ? albeit a 
very bright one ? to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution. Having driven out 
agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and despite the hostility of almost all of its 
neighbours, Rojava has not only maintained its independence, but is a remarkable 
democratic experiment. Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate 
decision-making bodies, councils selected with careful ethnic balance (in each 
municipality, for instance, the top three officers have to include one Kurd, one Arab and 
one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of the three has to be a woman), 
there are women?s and youth councils, and, in a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres 
Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army, the ?YJA Star? militia (the ?Union of Free 
Women?, the star here referring to the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has 
carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State.

How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by the 
international community, even, largely, by the International left? Mainly, it seems, 
because the Rojavan revolutionary party, the PYD, works in alliance with Turkey?s Kurdish 
Worker?s Party (PKK), a Marxist guerilla movement that has since the 1970s been engaged in 
a long war against the Turkish state. Nato, the US and EU officially classify them as a 
?terrorist? organisation. Meanwhile, leftists largely write them off as Stalinists.

But, in fact, the PKK itself is no longer anything remotely like the old, top-down 
Leninist party it once was. Its own internal evolution, and the intellectual conversion of 
its own founder, Abdullah Ocalan, held in a Turkish island prison since 1999, have led it 
to entirely change its aims and tactics.

The PKK has declared that it no longer even seeks to create a Kurdish state. Instead, 
inspired in part by the vision of social ecologist and anarchist Murray Bookchin, it has 
adopted the vision of ?libertarian municipalism?, calling for Kurds to create free, 
self-governing communities, based on principles of direct democracy, that would then come 
together across national borders ? that it is hoped would over time become increasingly 
meaningless. In this way, they proposed, the Kurdish struggle could become a model for a 
wordwide movement towards genuine democracy, co-operative economy, and the gradual 
dissolution of the bureaucratic nation-state.

Since 2005 the PKK, inspired by the strategy of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, declared 
a unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish state and began concentrating their efforts in 
developing democratic structures in the territories they already controlled. Some have 
questioned how serious all this really is. Clearly, authoritarian elements remain. But 
what has happened in Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the chance 
to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous territory, suggests this is anything 
but window dressing. Councils, assemblies and popular militias have been formed, regime 
property has been turned over to worker-managed co-operatives ? and all despite continual 
attacks by the extreme rightwing forces of Isis. The results meet any definition of a 
social revolution. In the Middle East, at least, these efforts have been noticed: 
particularly after PKK and Rojava forces intervened to successfully fight their way 
through Isis territory in Iraq to rescue thousands of Yezidi refugees trapped on Mount 
Sinjar after the local peshmerga fled the field. These actions were widely celebrated in 
the region, but remarkably received almost no notice in the European or North American press.

Now, Isis has returned, with scores of US-made tanks and heavy artillery taken from Iraqi 
forces, to take revenge against many of those same revolutionary militias in Kobane, 
declaring their intention to massacre and enslave ? yes, literally enslave ? the entire 
civilian population. Meanwhile, the Turkish army stands at the border preventing 
reinforcements or ammunition from reaching the defenders, and US planes buzz overhead 
making occasional, symbolic, pinprick strikes ? apparently, just to be able to say that it 
did not do nothing as a group it claims to be at war with crushes defenders of one of the 
world?s great democratic experiments.

If there is a parallel today to Franco?s superficially devout, murderous Falangists, who 
would it be but Isis? If there is a parallel to the Mujeres Libres of Spain, who could it 
be but the courageous women defending the barricades in Kobane? Is the world ? and this 
time most scandalously of all, the international left ? really going to be complicit in 
letting history repeat itself?